Since its inception, the defining paradigm of the World Wide Web (WWW) has been the ability to distribute content to a user on demand rather than limiting the user to pre-programmed content as in the case of traditional broadcast media (e.g., television, radio). In an effort to provide the ability to distribute high bandwidth media, such as video, efficiently there has been an effort to develop multicasting protocols for the Internet. Today's multicast solutions are directed at live event telecasting. Distribution of content on demand to individual users is very different and is not served by these conventional multicast solutions.
As the commercialization of the Internet progresses, situations arise where certain commercial or other web servers that serve information on an on-demand basis (e.g. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) servers) are bombarded with more hits than they are able to service, given the bandwidth of their connections to the Internet. Such situations may arise during periods of heightened interest in the subject matter web sites that the server is hosting. Under such circumstances it may be the case that there is excess CPU capacity in the server that is not being utilized to service client requests. In other words the bandwidth of the connection is the limiting factor, not the server processing power.
It would be desirable to be able to make more efficient use of the bandwidth of a connection between a server and the Internet, while still being able to service requests for information on-demand (as opposed to following a predetermined multicasting schedule).
What is needed is a system and method that allows a server to handle more requests without increasing the actual bandwidth of a connection between the server and the Internet.